Facebook Puzzle Solution: Find a City Without a Letter
There seems to be a "puzzle craze" on Facebook for the last few days: finding cities in your state without certain characters in the name. While the point of it is to see how quickly you can come up with an example off the top of your head, I took it as a chance to show the power of text processing with regular expressions.
An example of the puzzle:
SQL Azure: Solve an Excessive Transaction Log Space Usage Exception
Early this morning I was alerted of an interesting SQL exception from one of our data integration services: The session has been terminated because of excessive transaction log space usage. Try modifying fewer rows in a single transaction.
Run All Unit Tests in Team City
It's the simple things in life that make it enjoyable. One of them being able to configure your build server to automatically include all unit tests when it builds a release.
Until recently, we were manually adding each unit test library that we wanted to run to TeamCity's configuration. Apparently, though, it does support wild cards:
Creating New SQL Azure Logins and Users
Until recently, I didn't realize that SQL Azure allows you to create new logins, users, and roles. They don't expose this functionality through the UI, it all has to be done through T-SQL commands.
For example:
Scrum Alliance: Definition of Done, A Reference
In rebuilding one of our Definitions of Done, I came across this excellent resource from the Scrum Alliance: Definition of Done: A Reference.
One of the best points that the article makes is that the DoD is a very unique and specific document for every team (and every project). The article gives the example of the "Done" Thinking Grid, outlining many of the possible areas to check for doneness:
Tip: Find C# Comments Without Space After Delimiter
After conducting a Twitter mini-poll, I found that most of my followers agree with me on at least one point: code comments should have a space between the delimiter and the text.
You can perform a RegEx search in Visual Studio to find all instances of comments without the trailing space:
Facebook Promoted Posts: A Small Page's First Experience
Facebook recently launched a new feature for profiles and pages: promoted posts. They are meant to be a quick and easy way to get one of your posts in front of the eyes of not just your friends, but their friends as well.
Having a small Facebook page myself, I thought it'd be worth trying out the new feature. I put together a small graphic that would fit nicely expanded on my page, gave it a quick tagline, and setup the promotion; here's what it looked like:
Resolve Sync Issues Between Google Calendar and OS X Calendar
While I enjoy using Apple's products, I'm still very much a Google-user when it comes to web services. Generally, Apple and Google's software plays very well together thanks to both of their (partial) support of open web standards. However, sometimes things don't always work as you'd expect.
Ever since I upgraded my iMac to OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion), I was continuously having sync and refresh errors on my Google calendars:
The Road to Repayment: Student Loans Part 1
Today I accomplished a very big thing: I paid off one of my student loans.
Joy and I have a lot of life goals as a family, and we want to try and accomplish them in as proper of an order as we can. Part of that is reducing our overall debt, especially debt in student loans.
